The Big Picture |
- The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win
- Quoting Elizabeth Warren
- Here’s The Thing: Robert Osborne
- Economists: Things We Are Ignorant About
- Look Out Below: Futures Are Hugely Negative, Down 174
- Stormville / Long Beach After Sandy / Jersey Strong
- Verizon vs Apple: My iPhone 5
- 10 Sunday AM Reads
| The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win Posted: 04 Nov 2012 04:00 PM PST The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins. No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations and flat-out lies. Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People. The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are. Naturally, the media won’t report any of this. Major newspapers and cable networks jump all over anything they think will make My Side Look bad. Yet they completely ignore critically important and incredibly relevant information that would be devastating to The Other Side if it could ever be verified. I will admit the candidates for My Side do make occasional blunders. These usually happen at the end of exhausting 19-hour days and are perfectly understandable. Our leaders are only human, after all. Nevertheless, the Other Side inevitably makes a big fat deal out of these trivial gaffes, while completely ignoring its own candidates’ incredibly thoughtless and stupid remarks — remarks that reveal the Other Side’s true nature, which is genuinely frightening. My Side has produced a visionary program that will get the economy moving, put the American People back to work, strengthen national security, return fiscal integrity to Washington, and restore our standing in the international community. What does the Other Side have to offer? Nothing but the same old disproven, discredited policies that got us into our current mess in the first place. Don’t take my word for it, though. I recently read about an analysis by an independent, nonpartisan organization that supports My Side. It proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything I have been saying about the Other Side was true all along. Of course, the Other Side refuses to acknowledge any of this. It is too busy cranking out so-called studies by so-called experts who are actually nothing but partisan hacks. This just shows you that the Other Side lives in its own little echo chamber and refuses to listen to anyone who has not already drunk its Kool-Aid. Let’s face it: The Other Side is held hostage by a radical, failed ideology. I have been doing some research on the Internet, and I have learned this ideology was developed by a very obscure but nonetheless profoundly influential writer with a strange-sounding name who enjoyed brief celebrity several decades ago. If you look carefully, you can trace nearly all the Other Side’s policies for the past half-century back to the writings of this one person. To be sure, the Other Side also has been influenced by its powerful supporters. These include a reclusive billionaire who has funded a number of organizations far outside the political mainstream; several politicians who have said outrageous things over the years; and an alarmingly large number of completely clueless ordinary Americans who are being used as tools and don’t even know it. These people are really pathetic, too. The other day I saw a YouTube video in which My Side sent an investigator and a cameraman to a rally being held by the Other Side, where the investigator proceeded to ask some real zingers. It was hilarious! First off, the people at the rally wore T-shirts with all kinds of lame messages that they actually thought were really clever. Plus, many of the people who were interviewed were overweight, sweaty, flushed and generally not very attractive. But what was really funny was how stupid they were. There is no way anyone could watch that video and not come away convinced the people on My Side are smarter, and that My Side is therefore right about everything. Besides, it’s clear that the people on the Other Side are driven by mindless anger — unlike My Side, which is filled with passionate idealism and righteous indignation. That indignation, I hasten to add, is entirely justified. I have read several articles in publications that support My Side that expose what a truly dangerous group the Other Side is, and how thoroughly committed it is to imposing its radical, failed agenda on the rest of us. That is why I believe 2012 is, without a doubt, the defining election of our lifetime. The difference between My Side and the Other Side could not be greater. That is why it absolutely must win on November 6.
Source: |
| Posted: 04 Nov 2012 01:00 PM PST My wife is a big Elizabeth Warren fan:
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| Here’s The Thing: Robert Osborne Posted: 04 Nov 2012 09:00 AM PST This week on Here's The Thing, Alec talks with Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies. Today Osborne plays the role of ambassador to a bygone era. We hear the journey he took to get there — which could have been a classic movie itself. Osborne tells Alec about meeting Lucille Ball: "If it had been Lana Turner I met or somebody I wouldn’t have been able to talk, but it was Lucille Ball." Nonetheless, Ball ended up playing an influential role in Osborne's life, encouraging him to pursue writing over acting. Later Osborne explains some of challenges he faced at The Hollywood Reporter, when he found himself writing what was really supposed to be a gossip column: "I never felt comfortable intruding upon people that wanted to keep a secret. Because I think secrets are important to have." Robert Osborne |
| Economists: Things We Are Ignorant About Posted: 04 Nov 2012 08:00 AM PST Economists have been stumped by the past dozen years. The Dotcom collapse was an early warning that economists, as a class, were not clued in. Sure a handful recognized that there were budding problems — think Bob Shiller — but he was notable as an exception. Then we had the entire debacles of 2000s – derivative implosion, housing collapse, credit crisis, market crash — and we found that the vast majority of economists are academic theorists who were completely blindsided by events in the real world. And those were the good ones, as opposed to the biased hacks whose goals have nothing to do with discerning objective reality. We need to admit that Economists, as a profession, are stumbling around in the dark. To quote Edward Hadas, “Policymakers and pundits still make confident pronouncements, but the conclusions are radically different. The expert disagreements give away the truth: ignorance reigns.” Hadas identifies six questions which professionals should stop pretending they can answer:
If economists cannot explain the basic workings of the economy, perhaps we should be relying on them much less for policy advice . . .
Source:
Previously: Letter from Chicago: F (January 5th, 2010) How Economists Got It Wrong (September 6th, 2009) Read It Here First: "What Good Are Economists?" (April 25th, 2009) RIP Chicago School of Economics: 1976-2008 (December 23rd, 2008) The Illusory World of Economic Forecasting (September 19th, 2006) Mystery of the Awful Economists, part 2 (April 2005) Mystery of the Awful Economists (Part III) (April 2005) 2004: A test of Supply Side economics (December 27th, 2003) |
| Look Out Below: Futures Are Hugely Negative, Down 174 Posted: 04 Nov 2012 07:04 AM PST click for updated futes
Duh, these are from Friday. I need some sleep and a hot shower |
| Stormville / Long Beach After Sandy / Jersey Strong Posted: 04 Nov 2012 05:51 AM PST Residents of Long Beach, N.Y., begin cleaning up from the storm November 2, 2012By Vijai Singh and Mike Winerip ~~~ Residents of New Jersey's iconic shore say that Hurricane Sandy will not wash away their determination to rebuild the battered coastline. November 2, 2012By Shayla Harris ~~~ With all the destruction, personal loss and inconvenience of half the city of New York without power, there were lighthearted moments on Fifth Avenue during Monday's storm. November 2, 2012By Joanna Nikas |
| Posted: 04 Nov 2012 05:00 AM PST I don’t trust people. I could have ordered my iPhone 5 on September 21st. I’m awake at that hour. But knowing I was going out of town I waited… That was a mistake. Then they said you could order online and pick it up in the store the next day. Turns out too many people got the memo. That turned out to be undoable. Then I was going to be out of the country. I couldn’t order it because the change in my cell plan was pending, the switch to the overseas iteration, but today with my trip canceled and my regular plan intact, I decided to drill down and get it taken care of. What an ordeal. I could order from Apple. Like most people. But in my conversations with Verizon regarding my overseas plan, I found out that I qualified for a thirty dollar discount, so I bit the bullet and ordered from them. Or at least I tried to. To say Verizon’s website is confusing is to be charitable. You have to select the phone twice. But when it came to selecting the plan, it choked. Said it couldn’t be done. So I switched browsers. From Safari to Firefox. But in Firefox, the ability to decline insurance was so far off the screen…it was unclickable. So I decided to start all over and pay extra on the Apple site. Especially since I could get a better case and purchase AppleCare direct. Yup, if you buy via Verizon, you’ve got to go to the Apple Store with your new iPhone, sans any deterioration/scratches, to pay them ninety nine dollars for this warranty. But Apple said I’d get the phone in the middle of December. And Verizon said I could get it in under two weeks. So I went back to Verizon. I fired up speedy Chrome. And just when I was finalizing my order I realized… My billing and shipping addresses were different. I was unable to go backwards, it was literally impossible. So I had to start all over to find out you can’t ship to a different address. It was then that I took the plunge. I picked up my receiver. I dialed Verizon. My nephew made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year selling automobiles. Impossible you say! Car salesmen are the worst! That’s exactly the case. Which is why Andrew triumphed. Unlike everybody else selling luxury automobiles, he knew the product. I mean if you’re laying down for a Lexus or BMW, shouldn’t your salesman be more knowledgeable about the car than you are? One great thing about Verizon. If you’re on hold, it doesn’t last long. I got April on the line. I explained my dilemma. She said she could take care of it. Only one problem, I knew more about the iPhone 5 and the accompanying plans than she did. I knew I had to switch from an unlimited data plan to a tier. I told her I wanted five gigabytes a month. You can change it thereafter, but I figured I’d start large, and avoid penalties. Hell, maybe it’d turn out I needed ten gigabytes! And I’m going through all the details again and again with April. Because that’s the kind of guy I am, I need to get it right. And she’s getting hot under the collar. And it’s all taking too long, being put on hold over and over. But then finally it’s done. And two hours later I get an e-mail with the wrong shipping address and the wrong-sized data plan. So I call and I get Mike. Who wastes ten minutes telling me the shipping address can’t be changed. That we can cancel the order and start all over. How can this be? I can buy the phone at apple.com in a matter of minutes, I’m blowing all afternoon with Verizon? I ask to speak to his supervisor. Calmly. He puts me on hold. Says it’s impossible. He’ll help me. I say I want the supervisor. He says she’s out to lunch. I hang up. I call Global Support. Because they’re of a higher caliber. Nick is nice, but he can’t figure out how to do it. So I ask for a supervisor. Mike is even nicer, he says the best way to do it is to cancel the order, although I’ll lose my place in line, but I say fine. But then the phone can’t be reordered. The system needs to clear. Mike says he’s gonna have to call me back in an hour or two. And he does. And I ordered the phone. But I haven’t gotten the confirmation e-mail yet. I’m praying it will have no mistakes, because I’m beyond frustrated trying to give Verizon my money. P.S. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he immediately streamlined the product line. This had all kinds of benefits. Both supply side and consumer side. You knew what you were buying. And when you go to the Apple Store, they know what they’re selling. Whereas so many fakokta phones are being sold by Verizon that no one’s got a clue. But I guess that’s o.k. They’ll just sell an Android phone whose software can’t be upgraded to someone too dumb to be a power user anyway. Power users, that’s what we’ve all become. We expect our devices to have features and to be able to use them intuitively, without consulting the manual. P.P.S. If your website sucks, you’re gonna have a hard time making sales. Verizon could have just copied Apple’s site. Amazon gets it right. How could Verizon get it so wrong? This is where the rubber meets the road, why did they have to hire amateurs? P.P.P.S. Simplicity. This is what kills ticket sales. People have to jump through hoops on Ticketmaster only to find out there are hidden fees. You wonder why they get pissed off? You could sell them all-in, paperless, utilizing Apple’s Passbook, which made a huge dent in the baseball playoffs, but music is balkanized, with competing fiefdoms heeding progress. The players think they’re winning, but they’re losing, the consumer checks out. P.P.P.P.S You hate Apple, I get it. But when you’ve got a problem with your Samsung phone, who you gonna call? And you may want to hack your device, but very few do. Change your own oil recently? Install your own muffler? People just want their cars to work. Mercedes-Benz made its cars so complicated that its J.D. Power ratings sank and so did its sales. Cutting edge only works if your customers can catch up with you. P.P.P.P.P.S. It’s the little things. More than being nice. If this is your job, can you do it? It’d be like showing up at the thruway tollbooth and finding out the attendant can’t make change. Huh? If you work as an usher, you’d better know where the seats are. But too often people don’t. There’s no pride in the job. Then again, the pay sucks. But I’m telling you if you can show up on time and do your job you’re gonna go to the head of the class, because most people can do neither, and your boss will notice you and promote you. P.P.P.P.P.P.S. You know how many times my computer has crashed? Exactly none. I’ve had a hard drive go down, but my point is with technology, it either works or it doesn’t. Isn’t that Apple’s slogan, “It just works!”? That’s what we’re all looking for. I mean I have to get in my car, drive to the Santa Monica Apple Store, park, go inside, wait in line just so I can pay for an extended warranty, i.e. AppleCare? Everybody’s got a lot more money than time. And if you’re selling a premium product, and that’s what an iPhone 5 is, you’ve got to respect the customer, you’ve got to make it easy, you’ve got to save them time.
~~~ – http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz – http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1 |
| Posted: 04 Nov 2012 04:30 AM PST Some Sunday Reads to start your hour shortened day:
What are you reading?
Job Creation During the Obama Administration
Source: Global Macro Monitor
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